Rhubarb Pie

The rhubarb grew in the dirt along one side of our house. It came up year after year without fertilizer, pesticides, or anyone doing anything to it. The woman who took care of me until I was twelve years old made pies with this rhubarb. I wouldn't eat it, but everyone who did said it was good. This woman, a country woman from a tiny upstate New York village, picked a fruit that grew wild and made something delicious and nutritious from it. I didn't know it at the time but I learned a lot from this woman, whose name was Mabel.



She tended our garden and grew things that were both useful and beautiful. The Marigolds were natural insect repellants that protected the other flowers. Chives were a salad ingredient. Next door to us, the neighbors had a crabapple tree in their back yard where we kids plucked sweet sour snacks. Wild strawberries grew in an empty lot across the street. These were smaller than the store bought ones, but still tasty. As a kid, I seldom ate potato chips and/or soda. Between meal snacks grew outdoors.



Mabel taught me about honey and lemon and gingerale for colds and sore throats. About baking soda and vinegar to clear and clean a sink drain. She taught me the names of the wildflowers that grew everywhere in pre development upstate New York: Black Eyed Susans, Indian Paintbrush, Lady's Slippers, Buttercups, Queen Anne's Lace. Maybe most importantly, she taught me about acceptance and love. When she brought me with her to her family's home for a two week country vacation, she treated me exactly like a member of her own family, not a guest or visitor.



In those days, the natural world intersected our everyday lives. My father put mud on a painful bee sting and the pain stopped almost immediately. Small red wintergreen berries grew on bushes in the surrounding woods. They were crisp, slightly minty. Sometimes I gathered apples from a tree not far from our house and baked a pie. Dandelion greens, my father told me, went into salads made by my Italian grandma. No doubt it was more nutritious than the iceberg sold in supermarkets in those days. And though I never tried it, my friend Marla's mother told me about her recipe for a home made Dandelion wine.



These days few people have gardens. Growing a garden is a radical pasttime. People are too busy working for someone else, so they can pay a mortgage or rent, and keep the cable turned on. Of those who do have gardens, even fewer have gardens free from chemicals, pesticides, and fertilizers. The soil has become contaminated, depleted of nutrients. You're more likely to eat organic food from super Walmart than from your own garden.

The way it is isn't the way it has to stay. We can change the world, one garden at a time.

Back to the Garden

At this time, when I could be doing pretty much whatever I want, I am pulling weeds. I'm cutting back dead branches, raking my fingers through wet soil, picking out dead leaves and flipping them over the fence, in this back yard garden. Right now this is what I care about: this small back yard garden.

It's not my garden, and not my yard. It's a rental property and I'm a visitor here. The aloe plant was "mine." I grew it on my back porch, transplanting it into ever larger pots before I moved out of my apartment, and found a new home for it here. Also here is my pepper plant, a Mother's Day gift. These are small, long, hot peppers. They start out lavender, turning pink, and then red. When bright red, they're ripe and ready to eat.

It has been an unusual year, this year just passed. Some losses, some wins. Some projects completed that I never could have envisioned just two or three years ago. When I walk outside here, past the garden, to carry out the trash, a parade follows--or leads: my granddaughter, the cats. They want to be out here too, with the long legged birds that wade in the lake, or the little ones that chatter in the branches overhead; with the tiny lizards that scurry on the sun baked sidewalk; and with the ducks gliding on the water's glassy surface. The cats and my granddaughter, they never get tired of this place. Neither do I.

It's been a year when "home" has been elusive, when I've been redefining the meaning of home, and a lot of other things, and sifting through what's important and what's not-- the way I sift through this soil.

And so, despite the book I've completed, that I'd like to see published, and the other book incubating in my head and on scraps of paper, and the hard fought and hard won struggles of recent years; at a time when I could be doing pretty much whatever I want, this garden, these trees, the miniature cactus garden-within-the-garden, the banana plant and the palms, my granddaughter and the cats are what matter to me. This garden, this blue sky, these birds. At the risk of sounding nauseatingly sentimental, I'll say it: If every person had a garden, this world would be a more beautiful place.

Here--especially here--as the days slide forward into summer, when heat and humidity chase most people indoors, I experience a more practical truth. If the world had more trees and fewer cars, the environment would be cooler--in more ways than one.

If everybody grew a garden, and everybody shared, nobody would have to go hungry.